This is a worldview that seeks to wage not a war against poverty but a war against the poor instead—those who have, in his view, shown insufficient faith. This might come as a surprise to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the teachings of Jesus, but it represents the culmination of a long strand of American Protestantism that gained hold after World War II.
Emerging from the New Thought movement espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson and friends in the 1830s, ideas about “mind power” found an amped-up audience in America’s new world primacy. Reds were under the beds, and evangelicals believed that this was an existential threat to the self-made, God-fearing man. Fretting that the New Deal was welfare masquerading as communism, Protestant leaders—who until then had largely set themselves outside and above the political realm—began making common cause with political opponents…
